Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

Well, we got an inch and a half.  Disappointing, especially as the weatherweasels had forecast 3 to 5 inches. It's cold, 20 F so they can make snow. 

If it can orbit a satellite it can put a warhead anywhere on Earth

The NORKs just launched an Earth satellite.  If your rocket has the delta V to achieve orbit, it can put that "satellite" anywhere on Earth.  I haven't heard just how heavy the NORK satellite was, but it's a start.  A helova start.  To have an ICBM, the payload has to be enough to carry a nuke.  We think, we don't know for sure, that the NORK nukes are "first generation" i.e. heavy, weighing a matter of tons.  Back in the fifties, when both we and the Soviets were getting into the ICBM business, the war heads would be first generation and be very heavy.  The Americans decided that the necessary rocket to hoist a first generation nuke would be ridiculously huge and so we didn't get  seriously to work on a missile until the later generation of nukes came along with weights down into the 100 pound area.  The Soviets wanted a missile so badly that they set to work to build the ridiculously huge rocket.  That rocket came on line about 1957. launched the first Sputnik, and did all the Soviet space launches for the entire Cold War.  We didn't come up with anything to match it until Saturn 5 in 1968. 

So who will I vote for tomorrow?

Gotta make up my mind today.  First off, being a Republican I am gonna vote in the Republican primary.  Second off, The Bern will win in NH if the polls mean anything at all.  Third off, I don't see much to choose between The Bern and Hillary.  The Bern will continue Obama's job of wreaking the US economy.  Hillary will continue to produce the string of overseas disasters of her tour as Secretary of State  Things like Syria, ISIS, Libya, Benghazi, Boko Haram, Ukraine, NORK nukes, and more.
  The Republican field is down a lot.  Iowa shows that the Donald, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are the best bets, everyone else is an also ran with very low poll numbers.  Even though I like Carly, I'm not going to vote for her 'cause I don't want to throw my vote away.  I'm not gonna vote for the Donald 'cause I think he will loose.  According to Gallup, 60% of the voters nationwide don't like him.  That is not a recipe for collecting the essential-to-victory independent voters.  Gallup says 43% of the voters are registered independent.  If they don't like you, your campaign is going nowhere. 
  So who's left?  Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio both gained enough votes in Iowa to look like possible winners. I like Marco a little bit more than Ted.  Too bad Chris Christy really clobbered Marco on Saturday night.  Too bad that no sitting senator seems to like Ted Cruz much, it shows the Ted has trouble getting along with peers.  Not a good thing for a president. 
   JEB would probably make a decent president, but I don't like the idea of three Bush presidencies in my lifetime.  And he is not a speaker to get the voters fired up for anything.  Chris Christy looks fairly competent but I have my doubts about his appeal outside of the Northeast.  Kasich has campaigned hard up here, and has a good record as governor and US representative but somehow he doesn't appeal to me. 
   Perhaps it is time to toss a coin?

The Bern says Wall St is all fraud

He was saying that on one of the Sunday pundit shows.  He is half right.  Half of Wall St activity is raising money for economic growth, the other half,  futures and derivatives and mortgage backed securities and short term security lending, is pure gambling.  When the bets go bad, it crashes the world economy, like back in 2007.
   Economic growth means building factories, airliners, pipelines, office buildings, residential housing, and new product development.  All of these activities require financing, you have to pay the workers and the suppliers, but the project doesn't bring in any money until it's finished.  So the project borrows the money to get up and running, and pays it back out of earnings from the finished project.  No money for investment, no economic growth. 
  The working part of Wall St raises the money and lends it out to worthwhile projects.  The tricky part of  finance is deciding which projects will succeed and pay off their loans, and which ones are flaky and will go bust, taking all the money down the drain with them. 
  The gambling part of Wall St does deals that lack any clear economic purpose, and are usually short term.  Real economic growth requires long term patient money, you cannot build anything worthwhile over night, worthwhile projects take months and usually years to pay off.  There are Wall Street operations that do overnight loans of both money and securities.  I submit that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished overnight, and that kind of short term lending is really gambling. 
   We need to identify gambling, and drive it off of Wall St, probably by taxing it heavily. 

The Questions Sucked

It went on for three whole hours. "So and so said this about you, Take 60 seconds and trash him back." was the question, asked over and over again.  Boring.   There were a few amusing moments such as young Florida tourist bumps up against Tony Soprano from New Jersey.  Bush got in a solid hit on The Donald about eminent domain. 
   Questions that did not get asked but should have.  How far will you go to wipe out ISIS?  How large are the American armed forces today and how large would you make them?  What will you do to get GNP growth back up to 3.5% from this quarter's 0.7%.  What kind of fortifications will you build along the Mexican border and how much would it cost?  What is "net neutrality" and where do you stand on the issue? Will you reform patent and copyright law?  And if so, how?  What deductions and exemptions will you remove from the personal income tax?  Mortgage interest?  EITC?  Charitable givings?  Marriage and children exemptions?  What will you do to take Wall St out of the casino and back to financing economic growth? 
   Any how, that is the last presidential debate I am going to watch.  And I still have not decided who I will vote for the coming Tuesday.

Democrats stand for Free Stuff, Republicans stand for good jobs

The Bern is offering the most free stuff.  He wants free healthcare, free college, and doubtless other stuff as well.  Hillary is behind The Bern, but she wants free contraception.
   No amount of free stuff  beats a decent job.  If you have a decent job you don't need free stuff, you can buy what you need with real money.  And your company pays for good healthcare, far better than Obamacare.  Republicans want economic growth which we have to have to offer jobs.  The working age population grows every year, unless the economy grows to match it, people are out of work.  Democrats have managed to bring US economic growth down to less than 1%, which is pitiful.  Economic growth ought to be 3 or 4 percent.
   One reason for pitiful economic growth is all the  lefty greenies out there who raise a stink every time anyone suggests building anything.  Northern Pass, and Keystone XL both come to mind.  I heard some Democrat on TV calling for closing all federal lands to oil exploration just the other day.

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

After a whole lot of "winter storm warning" and other theatrics from TV weathermen, we got an inch. It's still cold and the mountain is making snow. 

Our Heroin Problem

By all accounts we have a problem.  Deaths from overdoses are way up.  And so, our gallant legislature passed three bills to address the problem.  One will set up "drug courts", type and jurisdiction un specified.  You would think any real judge sitting in a real court, could recognize druggies and when appropriate, sentence them to rehab.  I don't see why we need to establish a special set of courts to do this. 
   Of course, we don't have much, if any rehab in NH, so the real judges sentence druggies to jail rather than letting them run around loose.  And our gallant legislature doesn't seem to be doing anything about the lack of drug rehab.
   Then they passed some more funding for law enforcement and called it anti drug legislation.   I can't remember what the third one was, but it didn't sound like it would do diddly about hard drugs.
   I believe that with enough of the right sort of drug rehab, we can get a lot of druggies off the stuff.  I'm not a real expert, so I might not have this right, but there ought to be some numbers (number of druggies entered into rehab, number druggies later rearrested for possession). I would expect some treatment programs work better than others.  We should copy the more successful programs.
   We also need to get the word out to our young folk.  We need to make sure they know that heroin and the other hard drugs will ruin their reputations, get them fired from their jobs, get them divorced, get them jailed, and kill them.  Schools, churches, and all social organizations should feel a responsibility for getting the word out.  Things like Facebook should at least prevent the sale of drugs on their sites, and blackball users who advocate drug use. 

Icebreakers $1 billion each?

Op ed in the WSJ this morning, a couple of retired general officers explaining the need for more US icebreakers.  Makes sense, especially if we are gonna have off shore oil exploration in the Arctic.  If they have an emergency on an Arctic oil platform, icebreakers can get up there for a rescue. 
   The OpEd claims that new icebreakers will cost $1 billion  apiece.  That sounds too high by  a lot.  An icebreaker is just a merchant steamer with a very strong hull, a specially shaped bow, and extra powerful engines.  You'd think you could buy one for 10-20% over the price of a standard merchant steamer.  Unless Pentagon weinies gold plate the specifications.  Which they have a lot of practice doing.  I think you can buy a supertanker for $200 million, you ought to be able to get an icebreaker for about that kind of money.
   Then the Op-ed veers off into the merits of leasing icebreakers instead of buying them out right.  This does not compute.  The only reason for leasing anything is you don't have the up front cash to buy it outright.  Uncle Sam has all the upfront cash in the world, and he can print more if he runs short.  The lessor has to make all his expenses plus some profit, His expenses include interest on the money he has to borrow to buy or build the ship.  A lease deal will cost the taxpayers more than an outright buy.  Especially as icebreakers are very specialized and I don't think there are any for sale, you need an icebreaker, you have to build it special. 

The year of A size post cards

We get a blizzard of ads in the mail these days.  New this year is the A sized post card.  Used to be a post card was 3 by 5 and got a cheaper postage than regular letters.  Now they are 8.5 by 11 (full typing paper size) and made of fine heavy paper.  And I get a lot of 'em.  I was able to light the fire on nothing but the A size post cards that came in over the last couple of days. 
   A size?  Engineering or draftsman jargon for a drawing the size of a piece of typing paper.  We had B size, C size, D size and more. 

Shannara: TV Show

So I watched it again last night.  Not bad.  The cast is good looking and can act.  Sets and costumes are right up to snuff.  However, nobody ever called anyone by name in the whole one hour show.  So I still don't know the stage names of any characters.  I suppose I could look them up on IMDB but I'm thinking the script writers could do better.  They have two decent warrior princesses, but I cannot tell them apart.  They both have long dark hair, wear the same dark leather outfits,  carry swords and ride horses.  
   And it is better than Galavant.

Flint's water. How about some scalps?

Every one knows, at least any one who has done plumbing or taken high school chemistry, that acid eats metals,  turning solid metal into invisible ions dissolved in the acid, like salt dissolving into water. All water pipes installed before the 1980's are metal.  The plastic pipe now used didn't come on the market til the late 1970's.   You cannot allow the city water to become acid, 'cause it will eat the pipes all over the city.  Standard procedures for city water  works is to add enough lye (sodium hydroxide) to acid water to neutralize it.  This has been standard practice for a hundred years or more.  This ain't rocket science. 
   According to the newsies, when Flint switched over to using acidic river water which, for some reason, most likely a screwup somewhere, this was not done, and acidic water flowed all thru the city's water pipes, eating out the metal.  All copper plumbing is fastened together with tin-lead solder and older pipes are pure lead.  Our word "plumber" comes from the old Latin word for lead (plumbum). So, the lead content of Flint water soared up and up.
    Anyhow the newsies were on NHPR this morning wailing about the Flint water situation.  What needs to be done is find the persons who failed to add the lye to neutralize the acid, and prosecute them.  We ought to take at least three scalps, one from the Michigan environmental pollution agency, one from the federal environmental pollution agency, an one from the city of Flint water department. 

Coin Toss? Fair? 64:1 odds of winning 6 out of 6 coin tosses

TV reports that six close Iowa races between Hillary and The Bern were settled by coin tosses.  Hillary won all six.  Is she just lucky or was the fix in?  
Odds of winning one coin toss is 1:2, we all know that.  Odds of winning two out of two coin tosses is 1/2*1/2 or 1/4.  Odds of winning 6 out of 6 coin tosses is 1:2**6 or 1:64.  How lucky do you think Hillary is, really?

And then there were three

Iowa caucus has finally happened.  Ted Cruz in first 28%, The Donald second 24%, and Marco Rubio only 1 percentage point behind the Donald.   Hillary and the Bern split the vote 50-50.  
   Well, at least the Donald didn't win, if he had, and did he win in NH next week, he would have been unstoppable.  He is still there, still formidable, but he is beatable. 
   And I think Iowa narrows the Republican field down to three.   Which needed to be done, and sooner is better than later.

Sentencing reform

Used to be, back in the dim past, say the 1960's, judges had broad discretion in sentencing.  Some judges abused this discretion and let perps off with a slap on the wrist when the community thought the death penalty was warrented.  So over the last 50 years, legislatures have tightened things up with mandatory sentencing guideline laws, which called for very tough sentencing indeed.  The result, the US has more people in jail than every other place on earth.  And more prisons, and more unionized prison guards. 
  We ought to do something about this.  We could start with pot.  We should not be incarcerating people for mere possession of pot.  Although pot isn't good for you, it's no worse than tobacco which is legal in every state of the union.  Up here most adults view pot as a charge of convenience which the cops use to hassle teenagers. 
   Then we ought to remove lying to the cops or the FBI as felonies.  If they want to get you, all they have to do is keep on grilling you, and sooner or later you will say something that does not check out. Bingo, felony charge.  Far as I am concerned, it's up to the cops to get evidence of a real crime, not to cross up the suspect with repeated trick questions. 
   And conspiracy.  That's a vague lawyer's word for hanging out with criminals.  Let's eliminate conspiracy as a crime.  If the perp was doing a crime, fine bag 'em.  But if all you have is that the perp hung out with bad guys, tough, it's a free country.
   And I bet if a bunch of fair minded citizens reviewed all the felonies now on the books, they could recommend dropping half of them.

Galavant: The TV Show

So I watched it.  ABC Sunday night at 8 PM, a really good time slot.  The ABC suits must think it will catch on.  It's strange.  It's a swords and sorcery spoof.  It opens with the kinda ragged looking good guys army confronting the bigger and properly uniformed bad guys army.  For openers a jester, clad in motley, does a song and dance routine in the no man's land between the two armies.   Then we have the warrior princess leading the good guys give a rousing pre battle speech to her troops.  Only the words aren't her's they are the words Aragorn used to inspire his troops before the final battle at the gates of Mordor.  It goes on like this, one gag after another.  Some of them are fairly funny, others fall flat. 
   I think I will watch Supergirl next Sunday.

The Great Springfield Model Train Show

It's the biggest show except for maybe Timonium down in Maryland.  The Amhearst model railroad club puts it on at the Eastern States Fairground in West Springfield MA.  It's big, the train show filled all four of the very big exhibition halls at Eastern States.  It pulls in the fans, they can charge $5 parking and $14 admission and get it.  I saw license plates from as far away as Maryland and Ontario.  Traffic trying to get into the fairgrounds at 9 AM Saturday was fierce.  I'm guessing we had 10,000 people for Saturday, and the show runs thru today.
   Took me three hours to drive down from Franconia.  It was still dark when I got on I91 and I rolled right along.  I did try and keep it below 80 mph.
   The crowd looked older than it did last time I went to Springfield.  Mostly guys, mostly old enough to be retired.  Some small grandchildren who were fascinated by the moving model trains.  Very few middle and high school kids who would be old enough to build their own model railroads.  Not many working age folk.  This is clearly an old guy's hobby.
   They had dozens of operating layouts on the floor.  Big ones.  All modular, all take apart and load in a trailer deals.  They were all put together and looking very good. They had all the vendors in the world.  I bought some decals, some well used rolling stock to serve as projects, and some hard to find detail parts. 

Black Socks

Front page story in this morning's WSJ.  Army will now allow troops to wear black socks with gym outfits.  Lotta talk about why.  They didn't say how white gym socks look nerdy with nearly everything.  Then the story mentioned that the Army has a 57 page uniform regulation and a 287 page uniform guide.  Good lord.  How many field grade officers does it take to create 287 pages on what to wear?  Or was it GS12's?    That's a lotta paperwork.   Maybe we could do some cost cutting here?
   I spent six years on active duty in USAF and I cannot ever remember seeing, let alone reading, a uniform regulation.  I was able to look sharp and look regulation in front of my troops without a 287 page uniform guide. 

So I watched the Republican debate last night

Everybody looked good and sounded good.  I could vote for any of them.  Except Rand Paul who is an isolationist.  Nobody committed any lethal gaffes.  Nobody missed The Donald.  Any one of these guys ought to have no trouble beating Hillary. 
   And Megan Kelly seems to have a new hairdo, quite becoming.

Men's fashion from the WSJ

Half page story, with picture of "Next in Men's Fashion".  Shows five scruffy looking male models, wearing clothes I'd never be caught dead wearing.  We have one in a bright yellow turtle neck, grass green jacket, purple pants, and loafers without socks.  The other four are wearing mud color outfits.  The story called the color "brown" and said "It's the new black".   We have one "suit" (matching jacket and slacks) in a really loud hounds tooth check, with tailoring by Omar the tent maker, accessorized with a dark bead necklace.   And the next model is wearing a leather jacket, only it has white furry cuffs and white furry edging.  And the guy wearing a "military inspired" jacket that looks like jackets my grandmothers used to wear, black shiny slacks, and white gym socks under his loafers.
   The story claimed a 29 billion Euro market for global luxury ready to wear.   Maybe Euro males buy this stuff?

Shannara, TV show

Caught it last night.  It's a Game of Thrones wanna be show, comes on at 10 PM which is a bit late for me, but it was worth staying up for.  It is "based" upon the Shannara fantasy novels by Terry Brooks.  I read the first one many years ago and was sufficiently un impressed that I never read any more of them.  So I cannot intelligently comment upon how well the TV show tracks the books. 
   It's swords and sorcery with handsome young sword swinging heroes and some very pretty, leather clad heroines.  There is some vast undefined struggle between men and elves (both good looking) and some really ugly demons.  Dialog is mediocre.  For instance I never did catch the names of any of the handsome heroes or pretty heroines or the ugly demons.
   Still it was OK and I will make an effort to catch the next episode next Tuesday night.

Democratic Socialism, what is it?

The newsies occasionally ask a Democrat what the difference is between democratic and socialism.  You don't have to look far for an answer.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) set up for business in 1917 and lasted until 1989.  That was the biggest, longest lived, and most miserable socialist government in history.   Although the country styled itself as "socialist", the ruling oligarchy styled themselves as communist.  Communists and socialists believe in the same things except that communists believe they need a revolution to take power, whereas socialists think they can win power thru elections.  Otherwise they stand for seizing control of all economic activity (pretty much everything) and running it to suit themselves.  The Russians suffered thru 70 years of grinding poverty brought on by their socialist system. 
    The Bern undoubtedly claims that his socialism is different from the Soviet type.  You can believe as much of that as you like. 

Conservative, Smervative

The Republican candidates are on TV bashing each other.  Favorite bash, "He's not a true conservative".  Well, I don't really care if he is, or ain't, conservative.  I want a candidate who will make an effective president.  For openers we need someone who can win the general election. Which means getting the independents to vote for him.  Independents are centrist in their thinking, the ones who are lefties join the Democrats, the righties join the Republicans, what is left (43% of the electorate) is middle of the road.  Come out too strong for some favorite conservative causes, the gold standard, pro life, isolationism, tax relief for the 1%, and others,  you loose the independents. 
   We need someone who can lead, i.e. present a program and convince a majority of the citizens (and their Congresscritters) to support the program.  A candidate who insults the other side is going to have trouble getting the other side to go along with his program.  
   We need someone willing and able to accept advice.  As a subset, we need someone who can judge which advisers know what they are talking about and which ones don't.   Nobody knows everything, any president needs to accept good advice from qualified experts.  And ignore bad advice from know-it-alls.

The Economist thinks low oil prices are bad

It's the cover story.  Cute cover cartoon showing a pumpjack with a demon's head, all in black.  They do admit that low oil prices are good for consumers, but then they go on and on about the hardships visited upon oil producers, and banks who financed oil production.  Woe to banks, woe to producers.
Well, sorry about that banks and producers, there are a whole lot more people benefiting from low fuel prices than there are producers.  As to banks who may not get their loans paid back, time to wise up.  Don't loan money unless you (and your own figures) can show that the borrower will make enough to pay you back.  And don't expect any more government bailouts. 

Faster than light

I think I heard this story before.  Like last year.  If memory serves, the faster-than-light results went away after some cables on the apparatus were reseated. 

So how much snow is everyone getting really?

TV newsies have been ranting about snow all day.  How bad is it where you are?  Up here we don't have a flake and the forecasts are for no snow on Cannon. 

US classification system is changing

Back when I was in the service, there were just three levels of classification, confidential, secret, and top secret.  The story I was told, goes like this. Congress passed this into law with the intent of preventing bureaucrats from refusing to show classified to Congressmen on the excuse that the stuff was classified too high for Congressmen to see.  Congressmen don't like being told they cannot see stuff and took steps to insure that they would not be locked out of juicy stuff. 
    Well, even way back then, three levels of classification wasn't enough.  We had all sorts of top-secret nimbus, and top secret nuclear, and so on.  This was done to implement need-to-know.  Set up a classification with a weird name, and then restrict access to those holding a weird name clearance.  This worked, and everyone understood that you didn't want to ruffle any Congressional feathers by being stuffy about their clearances. 
   Fast forward to now.  They are raking Hillary over the coals for possessing "Top Secret SAP" classified on her server.  And the TV newsies are claiming that Top Secret SAP is so secret that Congressmen are not allowed to see it.  Ohh.  We never would have said that back in the day.  USAF policy used to be, treat Congressmen right, and that includes showing them anything they want to see.  Most we would do is try to impress them with the need for keeping their lips buttoned.

Low oil prices are good

Most of us consume oil and the lower the price the better for us.  I'll grant that people in the oil business, and who have loaned money to oil companies are hurting.  But there are a lot more oil consumers than oil producers.  And low prices are good for consumers.  Greatest good for the greatest number. 

Sarah Palin endorses The Donald

This is going to help The Donald.  Sarah has nearly universal name recognition, everybody knows who she is.  She is controversial and polarizing.   Lotta women detest her.  But a lotta plain ordinary people like her and find her progress from soccer mom to state governor to vice presidential candidate inspiring.  If she can do it, I can do it.   Anyhow, Sarah's endorsement counts for a lot, in fact it's hard to think of anyone except perhaps the Pope whose endorsement carries as much weight as Sarah's.
   I wish Sarah had endorsed Ted Cruz, but she didn't. 

99 Restaurant decorates with local photos

The good old 99 restaurant in Littleton went to the trouble of taking and framing and hanging in the dining room, a bunch of good local photographs, things like Littleton Main St, the Opera House, the Pollyanna stature at the library. 
   Nice touch for a chain restaurant. 

Over Processing of food

You can barely find whole chickens in the market anymore.  Lots of chicken parts, breasts, drumsticks, thighs, tenders, and such, all of which require someone to cut up whole chickens, where as a whole chicken, good for stuffing and roasting, and also can be readily cut up into parts by any halfway cook, are scare.  Why do the foodstores go to all this cutting up?
   For that matter, whole fresh mushrooms are loosing out to fresh sliced mushrooms.  Why?  the whole mushrooms last longer than they do after slicing. 

Is your router finking on you?

The Wall St Journal ran a cover story yesterday claiming that many of our routers, those little $50 boxes that allow more than one computer to use a single internet modem, have unfixed security bugs in their firmware.  Bug that allow hackers to get into your computer, suck everything off the hard drive, get all your passwords, and turn your machine into a zombie that follows secret orders from bot net masters. 
   Me, I didn't even realize that I could update or patch the code running in my router.  Things to do, dig into the closet under the stairs where my router is stashed, find the model number of my router, and Google for software updates.   And figure out how to insert said software update into the router.

Job Growth

Every so often, the Commerce Dept reports the number of new jobs "created" in the US.  Last time they were claiming 292,000 "new" jobs. 
  I wonder where that "new jobs" number comes from.  Probably the bigger companies report the number of new hires to the guvmint.  Do they likewise report layoffs?  Suppose a company lays off 292,000 employees and replaces them by hiring 292,000 troubled teenagers.  Does this count as 292,000 "new jobs"? 
   Is the "new jobs" number any more realistic than the "unemployment rate" which only counts people drawing unemployment benefits?  As unemployment benefits run out, the unemployment rate drops.